STAN LEE
THE INTERVIEW

To the world, Stan Lee is the man who rocketed Marvel Comics to their place at the top of the comics industry. Along with artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, Stan created many famous characters who are still recognizable to this day… Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, Dr. Strange, Daredevil, the Hulk, and even the X-Men all sprang from the mind of Stan Lee.

During the “Marvel Age” of comics, Stan Lee brought in a slew of new heroes, and at the same time he put new spins on characters like the Sub-Mariner and Captain America.  His efforts gave readers a fresh look at old heroes and an exciting look at brand new ones.

Lee’s characters weren’t just heroes… they were also people deep down, with emotions, strengths, and even weaknesses.   This approach brought new readers over to Marvel in droves, and also helped the comics industry to blossom as well.

Stan Lee, or Stan “the Man” as he is know around the world to his fans, hired on at Marvel in New York and had become an editor about a year later.  He had started at the age of sixteen and was the youngest editor in comics at the age of seventeen.

Lee served as editor, art director and of course head writer at Marvel and in his first twenty-five years he would write at least two comics per week; sometimes as many as five.  These were in addition to writing for newspapers and writing screenplays for radio and TV.

When he was officially named as publisher of Marvel in ’72, Marvel comics were the best selling comics in the country.

These days, Stan is on the net at Stanlee.net.  Here you can find ‘webisodes’ of new Lee creations such as the 7th Portal and the Accuser.  Stanlee.net is run by Lee’s own company, Stan Lee Media, and since it’s launch it has been an extremely successful endeavor with both old fans and new ones.

Later this year, Lee will be working for one-time rival and competitor, DC Comics. Stan will be doing a twelve issue limited series for DC, which will show fans what the DC Universe could have been like if Stan Lee had been given the reigns way back when.  Industry giants like Jim Lee, Adam Hughes, and George Perez are all set to work with Lee on this new project, which is one of the most highly anticipated comics events in recent history.

The Stan Lee Imagination train is running full steam ahead, with no signs of slowing down, and the fans are loving it.

Now Hero Realm, the Ultimate Online Comics Magazine, is lucky enough to spend some time with Stan Lee, the Ultimate Comic Book Creator! 

Stan Lee the Hero Realm Interview

Stan: Alex, Stan Lee, Hi.

Alex: Hi, how are you doing, sir?

Stan: What can I do for you?

Alex: As you know, my name is Alex Hamby, and on the line with me is George Berryman he’s my partner at Hero Realm.com.

Stan: Hiya, George.

Alex: We’ve just got a few prepared questions that we’d just like to go through.

Stan: I’ll give you some unprepared answers.

George: First of all, Stan, you live an amazing life these days from meetings with George Hamilton, creating an action hero of Mary J. Blige and dinner with the President. What is a typical day in the life of Stan Lee like these days…

Stan: A total madhouse. I never know, when I come into the office, what’s going to be waiting for me.

George: How do you find time for everything?

Stan: I don’t. All my life my biggest problem has always been racing the clock. I have always had more to do than there was time to do it. The good thing about it is there’s never time to get bored.

Alex: 7th Portal has been signed to a movie deal…

Stan: Yeah, Mark Canton is going to produce it. He is formerly the head of Warner Brothers.

Alex: Is there anyone else attached to it?

Stan: Not yet. We’re just starting.

Alex: And what is your involvement going to be with the project?

Stan: I’ll be one of the co-producers.

George: Regarding the Spider-Man film, Stan; how much has Sony or director Sam Raimi spoken with you regarding content or character?

Stan: Not yet. 

Stan: I know Sam, in fact, he and I tried to do a Thor movie about, oh God, it must have been ten or fifteen years ago. So, he’s a great guy and I assume I’ll be hearing from him sooner or later but right now I think they’re just starting to put things together.

George: So, if I ask you real nice do you think you can sneak me into the premiere?

Stan: (laughter) If I get invited.

George: Spider-Man is such an enormous entity, Stan. With his fans, any changes made to him in the Sony film tend to spark wild debates, even when simply rumored…

Stan: Oh, I don’t know that they’re going to change anything.

George: Many fans out there are adamantly opposed to the rumor of organic web-shooters instead of mechanical…

Stan: Oh, I have no idea. I’m not part of that. I know as little about it as…in fact, you probably know more about it than I do because you have more time to search the web and get the rumors.

Alex: Stan, you are the most recognized person in the comic’s genre today…

Stan: Don’t you forget it.

Alex: Your work is like a piece of Americana with Spider-Man sitting up there with mom, apple pie and Mickey Mouse. How do you feel having created so many universally recognized characters?

Stan: That is the funniest question. You know, I have been asked that so many times and you know what it reminds me of? You know when you’re watching the news and there’s an accident?

Alex: Uh-huh.

Stan: Somebody maybe gets killed or something and they go to somebody else and say, “How did you feel when you saw him get killed?” What do they expect that person to say? “Oh, I enjoyed it!”

(Laughter)

Stan: I mean, what else can I say but that I feel good about it. I’m not going to say I consider it a tragedy.

(Laughter)

Alex: Fans are eager for your take on the DC universe of characters. It must be strange working on characters belonging to a company that at one time was referred to as the dreaded competition.

Stan: Incredibly Strange.

Alex: What led you to take on the project and what was the most interesting part?

Stan: I think the fact that it was a challenge. You know, how the hell am I going to do it? And I still don’t know.

(Laughter)

Stan: I’ve written the…or I’m in the process of finishing the Wonder Woman and I just wrote the story for Superman. Now I’ve got to do the copy for the artwork but I have no idea what I’m going to do with the others.

See, the biggest problem is that I have to do them differently than they are done and I’ve got to find a way to do it so I don’t totally make enemies of every fan of those characters.

George: I don’t think you have anything to worry about with that though. Everybody’s pretty excited about this project.
George: How would the history of comics have been written differently had you found yourself at DC instead of Marvel back in the 60’s.

Stan: I guess DC would have Spider-Man, the Hulk and the X-Men and Marvel would have Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.

(Laughter)

Alex: You have spoken before regarding you take on Superman for DC but Hero Realm is wondering about what the Stan Lee take on Wonder Woman is. We have already seen the cover and it looks incredible. So, what will Diana’s story be through the Stan Lee looking glass?

Stan: Well, I can’t tell you really anything about it because they (DC) don’t want me to talk about these. I can tell you that she is not a goddess, she doesn’t come from the heavens, or wherever Wonder Woman comes from. See, I tried not even to read the originals so that I wouldn’t be influenced by it. I do know that Wonder Woman was some sort of goddess. The one that I’m writing is not. She is a regular human being. As regular as a super-heroine can be, that is.

George: There is so much buzz surrounding Stan Lee Media these days…

Stan: Good!

George: What projects do you have up your sleeve and how do you pick who gets to work with you?

Stan: Everybody that works with me is hand picked. I recently hired Mark Evanier. Do you know him?

George: I am very familiar with him.

Stan: He is to be one of our head writers, or our head writer. And I hired Will Meugniot who is the fellow who produced or directed the X-Men cartoon on television. He has done a million other things. He is the top television cartoon directors, writers, animators and everything. He’s in charge of everything that Mark is in charge of. 

(Laughter)

I never thought I would get a bullpen of artists that were as good as the ones I had years ago at Marvel but I gotta tell you I have found some artists out here. They just blow my mind when I see the artwork they’re doing. I think we can do anything and make it look better than anyone else.

George: What I have seen so far looks very good. I am loving 7th Portal.

Stan: I’ve gotta tell you this: What you’ve seen so far is nothing compared to what we’re going to do. 

Even the 7th Portal, when I look at what is up there now I cringe because it should be so much better and it’s going to be. What you see now is what we were working on for the first year. That was a training period and a learning period. 

I came into this not knowing how you do animation on the web. I think we certainly did our best but it could be and it will be from now on so much better. You just wait till this is finished and you will see our new stuff.

George: I love the what’s there now so whatever you have coming will surely blow me away.

Stan: I’ll give you an example; When I started this, I thought we would do what I did in the comics. I’d have stories that would be the equivalent of about twenty pages long with really good characterization, clever plots, good visual effects and so forth and we would have the advantage of having them animated and we would have actors reading the roles. I was so excited. Then I found out that you can’t have the equivalent of twenty pages because I found out that they had to be about eight or ten minutes long each of them. Then I found out, when I started whittling these down to eight or ten minutes, that they couldn’t be eight or ten minutes. They had to be no longer than four minutes. We had to whittle them down again.

I had to figure out how to get the feeling we used to get in our comic books into a four minute episodes which had already been written to be a thirty minute episode and we had been cutting and shaving.

So, that is what you are seeing now, the results of all the cutting and shaving and leaving out some of the best parts. But, we now know how to do it and the things that we are working on now, which you will be seeing in the days and weeks and months to come, well it’s going to make what we have up there now look like night and day.

We’re also adding so many new features. You’ll see new features going up on our website every couple of days.

Alex: Yeah, we noticed that the site is constantly changing.

Stan: It’s going to be…I’m thrilled at the way things are going. Everybody is as excited as hell because everybody has a hundred million new ideas and I’m perfectly happy to let them use all of them.

Alex: You’ve been asked so may times what your favorite heroes were that you’ve created but what Hero Realm wants to know is: Who is your favorite villain?

Stan: Oh, Dr. Doom.

Alex: Dr. Doom?

Stan: Oh, sure. 

George: Is there any reason that he’s your favorite villain above all the others?

Stan: I like the way he looks. I like the fact that he is king of his own country. I like the fact that when I used to write him…

And yes, Hero Realmers, this was the worst moment of our lives. Professionally we were embarrassed but more so frightened by the fact Stan would have the impression that we hung up on him. You see, the power went out right there in the middle of his sentence and there we sat, in the dark, frozen and shocked at what had happened. The cordless phones were dead and only one backup phone remained functional but all seemed lost. Then a beacon of hope arose like the sound of angels.

He called back! Sweet Sweet Salvation!

Stan: What did I say to offend you?

George: No, we had a power outage here.

Stan: No kidding. Where are you?

George: We’re in Dallas, Texas.

Stan: Well, that’ll teach you.

(Laughter…whew)

Stan: where were we? Oh yeah.

He was the king of his own country and when he did anything they couldn’t arrest him. He had this great sense of honor, that even if he had promised Reed Richards anything, Reed Richards knew he would keep his word because he might be a villain but he is still honorable. 

I mean there were a lot of facets to him that if I had been always writing the stories I would have kept playing it up. He was only a villain to me in the sense that he wanted to conquer the world.

I want you to think of something very philosophical now and very regal; suppose you wanted to conquer the world. Now you could walk up to a policeman on the street and you can say “Excuse me officer but I’d like to conquer the world!”. There is no way he could arrest you even if you were trying to conquer the world. It’s not a crime. Look in your law books. There is no crime called “Wanting to Conquer the World”. It’s not a felony, it’s not a tort it’s nothing. So, basically he wasn’t a criminal, he was just a guy who wanted to conquer the world.

George: Well, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Stan: Yeah and he might have been a nice guy if you got to know him.

(Laughter)

Stan: He’s by far and away my favorite though. Next to him was Galactus. They call Galactus a villain but I never really thought of him as that. I think that maybe the villains I liked the most aren’t really that…they’re beyond being villains, you know. They’re more than that.

George: I always liked Galactus too.

Stan: Magneto, who’s my third favorite. He also didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. He felt that the Homo sapiens were history. He felt that Homo superior is the next ruling race, just the way Cro-Magnon man took over after the Neanderthal man. He just felt he was the wave of the future and “why don’t the humans just get out of the way and let evolution happen?”

So, it’s not that he was a bad guy.

(Laughter)

George: Well, Stan, we sure do appreciate it.

Stan: And well you should.

(Laughter)

Stan: OK guys good talking to you.

George: Thanks, Stan.

And so we at Hero Realm, striving to provide our readers with the best content, horribly embarrassed ourselves. Of course, we could have kept it quiet but then we wouldn’t be giving you all of it. 

Thank you and keep reading those comics.

Alex Hamby & George Berryman